TNB Music’s staff picks for November, 2011:

Peter Gabriel

New Blood–Live in London [Blu-ray]

(Eagle Vision, 2011)

You already know how badly Peter Gabriel wants to be your Sledgehammer, and there are probably four humans left who remain unfamiliar with the iconic scene in SayAnything (you know- the one where John Cusack plays a quirky guy who shows how sincere he is by over-talking everything), where Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler holds high a boom box that blasts Gabriel’s pulchritudinous “In Your Eyes” beneath his girlfriend’s window.

Please explain what just happened.

I just read a bunch of these other interviews and realized I wasn’t going to be half as funny as Anthony Camera. So instead I have to try the honesty route and hope it works out.

What is your earliest memory?

I have this memory of a room where every wall is a different pastel color. Outside a window there is a pigeon cooing. I recently asked my mom what house this was and she kind of freaked out because we moved out of that house when I was only 6 months old.

You know how sometimes things fall apart? Or at least it seems like they do? Like you normally deal with life’s one-two punches with grace and humor and a healthy perspective, but for whatever reason lately you haven’t been able to stay on stable footing, and your perspective slants everything sideways and you regress back to childhood? I’ve been having a run of days like that.

I won’t deliver unto you the litany of my trials and tribulations. Work stuff. Home stuff. Kid stuff. Financial apocalypse. Exorcisms. A 17-year-old pregnant married daughter who is going to give birth any day. And so on.

I’ve noticed when you’re strong and you smile through the bullshit, people tell you what a good job you’re doing. Keep it up. Good work. But when your confidence wavers – when your stiff upper lip quivers – that’s when you find out who your champions are. I told a friend of mine the other day, “I woke up today and realized this is what I became when I grew up.” He told me I needed to change my story. Which I get. But sometimes, man… Sometimes when you lose your footing, it can be really hard to find it again.

here are three chapters in American Psycho—“Huey Lewis,” “Whitney Houston,” and “Genesis”—in which Patrick Bateman, the narrator, ruminates on three of his favorite musical acts.In the third such chapter, he writes:

I’ve been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke.Before that I really didn’t understand any of their work, though on their last album of the 1970s, the concept-laden And Then There Were Three (a reference to band member Peter Gabriel, who left the group to start a lame solo career), I did enjoy the lovely “Follow You, Follow Me.”

By this point in the book, Bateman has already mutilated a homeless saxophone player, chopped a co-worker to death with a chainsaw, and served his girlfriend a used urinal cake dipped in chocolate.But it was only upon reading the preceding paragraph that it really kicked in: “He thinks Phil Collins is better than Peter Gabriel?!?!Holy shit!That guy’s fucking nuts!”